Eccentric Circles

The theme for this week's I am the Diva--Zentangle challenge #74 is Eccentric Circles. Since this is the year of Summer Olympics I chose its logo of five interlocked circles as my string. I changed its  perfect symmetry into elliptical shapes so that they look eccentric and connected them to look like a venn diagram.

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Petit Wood CoverJournals

This week's fun project is these little journals made with wood boards. I bought the wood boards from Michaels (they are available in the unfinished wood section and cost 29 cents each). I stained them first and did image transfer using Modge Podge. I got the images from the wonderful The Graphics Fairy .
I used several images from there.

I have described here how I did the Modge-Podge transfer. I have some additional do's and dont's: (1) use a laser print or a photo copy. Inkjet copies will smear, (2) Bold and large images and words (CAFE ) transfer better than images with lot of tiny and delicate details (Poems of Love), (3) Minimize the white halo effect by using a thin layer of glue.  Image transfer using glue is a tricky process, but when it works it is really lovely.

I finished the CAFE journal using coptic binding and the Poems of Love was completed using the accordian format.

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Katrina and beyond

I just returned from a conference in New Orleans. This is my first trip to New Orleans and it is hard to be there without remembering the cataclysmic images of hurricane Katrina. Not that the location of my hotel, the French Quarters, was  much affected being several feet above sea level. In the Big Easy, the divide between the one percent and the 99% is a lot starker and it was this 99% that was most ravaged by Katrina. Little of that is visible in the French Quarters, a tourist hotspot. Except, for the permanent exhibition called Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and beyond at the Louisiana State Museum. From the continuous looping video of 24-hours before Katrina made landfall- the gigantic waves, the blinding rain, the toppling roofs, to the chilling breath stopping digital simulation of the breaching of the levees as neighborhood after neighborhood submerged in flood waters and to the stories of those witnessed it, it is haunting.

So, I decided to dedicate this week's I am the Diva Zentangle Challenge #73 Bridgen to the spirit of New Orleans. In Bridgen, string is the basis of the tangle. I used a grid map of New Orleans as my string and connected the various parts of the map (or string) with WAVES, HURAKAN, River Rocks and FLEURI (fleur de lis) is New Orleans' logo) and Fescu.

Thanks for visiting.